Raise the Hammer

Comment 123003

I appreciate your concern about creeping fascism, but I would respectfully suggest that you have the source of the threat exactly backwards.

One of Doug Ford's personally appointed candidates literally said in 2016 that he wants students to debate whether the Holocaust happened. That doesn't make him a Holocaust denier, exactly, but it does make him a Holocaust denier apologist.

Just for context, in recent years the same guy also railed against "the pussification of the West", called global warming "a lot of nonsense", said German women "deserve" to be raped because Germany welcomed refugees, claimed women having abortions are "robbing that child's father", refered to a day of commemoration on violence against women a "fake holiday" created by "feminazis", dismissed violence against homosexuals by claiming HIV is a bigger threat, and said employers should be allowed to discriminate against people based on their gender or ethnicity.

His position on the Holocaust is a shocking, blatant normalization of one of the cardinal lies of modern fascism. It provides cover for race hatred thinly disguised as "free speech" - hatred that has real world effects, measurable in the steady rise in racially-motivated hate crimes in Canada over the past several years.

No one on the left is calling for prisons or gulags or anything even remotely like it for being politically incorrect. What the right calls "political correctness" is, at bottom, an earnest desire to be more sensitive to the lived experience of other people - to stop and think before saying or doing something that is harmful to people who are marginalized by their sex, gender, orientation, ethnicity, disability and so on.

Doug Ford is pandering to white supremacists, who feel that he is speaking directly to them and legitimizing their hatred. That is a much bigger threat to liberty than some zealous undergrads shouting down Milo Yiannopoulos.